How to Write a Wild, Weird, and Intricate Anne Washburn Play
How did King Lear end up in a play about QAnon? Washburn talks about Anon at MCC Theater, writing by instinct, and why a perfect play is impossible.
Crystal Finn as the QAnon-obsessed protagonist in Anne Washburn’s Anon at MCC Theater. Photo: Monique Carboni.
Anne Washburn has written what she calls a “kitchen table play.” Anon, currently running at MCC Theater, takes place around a single dining table. The same table represents the two homes of two very different families: a QAnon conspiracy theorist and her husband and daughter, and the gay couple who lives across the street. What starts as a hyper-local tiff between neighbors over a Pride flag spirals into a story about political identity, internet culture, and the desire to belong. Washburn and I sat down over Zoom—a thematically appropriate medium for her play—to discuss her latest work.
I came into our conversation with a very specific thesis about Washburn’s approach to playwriting: She has a propensity to create hermetically sealed microcosms and explore her characters’ impulses within them. Though the themes it tackles are huge, Anon’s kitchen table is its lynchpin, and we never leave the suburban Texas households. In fact, the two opposing parties in the play never even converse with each other onstage.
Isolation is the name of the game—and it makes for even more potent conflict. “If they actually met, they probably wouldn’t freak out to the degree that is interesting for play,” says Washburn. “Our director, Anne Kauffman, keeps saying, all they had to do was walk across the street and chat.”
Throughout her career Washburn has used isolation as a tool to bring out the extremes of human behavior. She’s explored a self-isolating cult-like collective in The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire; followed a group of apocalypse survivors as they attempt to rebuild popular culture in Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play; and gathered a group of estranged friends on a remote ranch in Antlia Pneumatica.
Cricket Brown, Tom Pecinka, Bruce McKenzie, and Marianne Rendón in The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, directed by Steve Cosson at the Vineyard Theatre. Photo: Carol Rosegg.
The evidence for my thesis had mounted, yet Washburn seemed surprised by the theory. “I had never thought of my plays before in that way,” she said. “Now, I’m thinking of them in that way, and I’m thinking, ‘Is that true?’ It’s probably often true. I do like having restrictions in place. I liked very much the idea of writing a kitchen table play when I realized that was what I was doing.”
Still, her approach to playwriting isn’t nearly as calculated as I’d anticipated, having watched disparate threads in her scripts finely weave together to create tapestries of self-referential commentary. (Just watch what she does with Shakespearean soliloquy vis-à-vis contemporary TikTok influencers in Anon.) Yet, there’s no corkboard covered in red string mapping out her stories. For Washburn, it’s a much more free-flowing process. “I write a play because I’m curious about something,” she says. “I sort of come at it like a soap opera.”
The subject of her dramatics this time is Jeanie, played by Crystal Finn, a suburban mom who gets sucked into the right-wing conspiracy theories of QAnon and strikes out to become a harbinger of truth online, much to the chagrin of her rainbow-flag-flying gay neighbors across the street. But to fully explore Jeanie and her intentions, Washburn had to find a way to make her humanity accessible. “This is not an object lesson about somebody who’s gross,” she says. “The world is absolutely completely full of those. It’s not a problem to find someone to deplore. I just wanted as much as possible for as long as possible for people to keep in touch with her humanity.”
Anne Washburn, left, with director Anne Kauffman at opening night of Anon at MCC Theater. Photo: Bart Lentini.
We see that effort most clearly through Jeanie’s relationship with her daughter, Delia (Izabel Mar), which is also how Washburn’s use of Shakespeare as metaphor came into play. “I wanted to write a scene where the mother and daughter were talking about schoolwork,” she says. “That was a bond and a place that they could agree on and connect. Shakespeare dropped in because it felt content neutral in a way. Technically it was sort of accidental.”
Yet once she got Shakespeare—namely, King Lear—into the picture, she had a whole new jumping-off point to highlight Jeanie’s descent into conspiracy theory—including, but not limited to, vaccine fearmongering, Holocaust denial, and John F. Kennedy Jr. returning from the dead to become president. “King Lear is a play about someone who understands what it is to feel powerful, yet who feels profoundly powerless and it’s kind of killing them,” she explains.
Jeanie seeks power through engagement online: she desperately wants to be a truthteller waking up the masses. It’s the layering of details that makes Washburn’s plays feel special; you walk away making connections between moments and parallel characters, drawing big conclusions and feeling rather proud of yourself as a media-literate intellectual. (Or maybe that’s just me.)
“I have a theory about playwriting, which is that the moment you start to write a play, the play is written somewhere in the ether, and you sort of are stumbling across it.”
Still, Washburn is hesitant to take credit for her intricate world-building, much preferring to chalk it up to letting her brain just do its thing. “If something is of interest to you as a writer, it’s of interest to you for the reasons that you know, but also for a lot of reasons you don’t know,” she says. “The looser you are in your approach to what the story means, the easier it will be for all of the reasons you don’t know to step into operation.”
Washburn writes to find answers to questions she doesn’t yet know she’s asking—to draw the map in real time. “You want to be writing with as much access to your subconscious or your underbrain. The non-intentional parts of yourself just tend to be wiggier and more complicated and more interesting.”
She makes it sound so easy, almost like anyone can do it. As we spoke, I found myself so entranced by her process that I began to try to get her to explain to me how to write a play. How do these densely packed narratives full of deft symbolism and cultural commentary come out of one brain? Like any great writer, she couldn’t answer me. She just does it.
“I have a theory about playwriting,” Washburn says, “which is that the moment you start to write a play, the play is written somewhere in the ether, and you sort of are stumbling across it. There are a lot of decisions you make, which feel very random and then seem to have a lot of thematic connection.” It’s that thematic connection that makes Washburn’s plays feel satisfying.
And while Washburn may not consciously design those connections, it’s the limits she imposes on her plays that create the conditions in which those connections can emerge. In Anon, a single kitchen table and two politically opposed families create the means to explore an entire ecosystem of contemporary belief and belonging. Still, she implies everything she writes is a work in progress—in perpetuity. “Plays are sort of impossible, which is why they’re fun to write,” she says. “You can never write a perfect play. It’s too hard.”